Shadow Warrior 2 Revs Chainsword In Gameplay Trailer

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Given that Shadow Warrior 2 [official site] has a squillion weapons, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the supernatural FPS has a Warhammer 40K-style chainsword. It looks pretty great! There’s a terrible moment each time Lo Wang strikes an enemy, a drawn-out dragging as the chainsword’s teeth bite into flesh. I wonder how much time went into perfecting that. Anyway! I’ll surely rev one up myself after Shadow Warrior 2 launches on October 13, but for now we can watch Lo Wang swinging his in this 12-minute gameplay video:

The chainsword spraying neon blood in that blue cyberworld is pretty awful/great too.

More than anything I’ve seen of Shadow Warrior 2 before, though, this video does make me wonder about its procedurally-generated levels. They’re built of some lovely pieces – those glowtrees! – but I do worry about how good they are. The cyberzone, especially, seems to place objectives in just… places. While some individual encounters have nice spaces, as a world it seems a bit unfocused. I’m only going off what I’ve seen, mind.

Given that Shadow Warrior 2 is basically, as Adam said his preview in June, “first-person Diablo” maybe I’m reading it as a different sort of game. A game made for replayability and endless co-op shenanigans won’t want the same sort of levels as a linear FPS campaign.

Shadow Warrior 2 will cost £34.99/$39.99 when it arrives October 13th on Steam and GOG. It’s made by Flying Wild Hog and published by Devolver Digital. I’m 97% certain the chainsword reserved for a pre-order bonus is different to the flash one in this video.

(This video was given to Ian Games Network as an exclusive in August but this version here runs at 60fps rather than 30 and doesn’t have Ian’s name scrawled in the corner of the screen, so don’t you grumble at me that this is old news. If you want to see this cyberstuff played with the HUD on by, er, someone who’s not really played Shadow Warrior 2 much, cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer had a go.)

I hope there’s an option to turn off the protagonists voice, I found his banal exclamations tiresome after only about 5 minutes into the video. And I bet by the end of a play through you’ll have heard them all 40 times. I can’t say I’ve ever played a game where I’ve enjoyed the playable character talking to themselves. It removes agency for one, I mean, I’m him, right? But I didn’t say that… Why are you saying things I don’t feel? Even when it’s a third party it’s annoying when they keep saying pointless things – I’m currently playing through Mad Max and if I hear Chumbucket say ‘here comes the mighty duster’ one more time I’m going to burn him alive.

I think sound designers should stick to less ‘talky’ dialogue in these contexts. Grunts, ‘woh’s and ‘fuck!’s, things you’re likely to be muttering as a player. They clearly add it in to make it feel more ‘alive’ but I think it achieves the opposite, turning characters into fairground animatronics.

I can’t count the times in the previous game where Wang and i uttered almost the exact same comment at the same time. They were very well placed, from a cheer when we defeated a very challenging monster to a “oh-shit, oh-shit, oh-fucking shit” when two more appeared. I am worried now that stuff is a lot less scripted, that they’ll lose the timing of those comments.

And i remember the previous game required a lot more dodging not to die (i played on hard), this video seemed like he just stood there applying chainsaw until their hp bar reached zero. If this game end up playing like Borderlands, which seems like where they’ve taken inspiration from (judging from the hp bar, damage numbers, and resistance listings), i’m gonna get bored really quick.

But considering how much i enjoyed the previous Shadow Warrior there is probably nothing, short of turning it into a moba, they can do that will make me NOT buy this game.

Personally I don’t really care how good the level design/generation is, because these days it’s shit in most FPS games anyway and I’m far more interested in the moment-to-moment action/gunplay. If they make it really fun to kill stuff then I probably won’t end up pay attention to the level geometry. The only concern that comes to mind is if the level generation doesn’t properly take advantage of the mobility aspects of the game etc.

I’m having a bad feeling about this procedural thing since the first time I heard Shadow Warrior 2 will have them. I don’t really care if “portions” of the map were handcrafted, “procedural generation” for me screams “lazy development”.

I’d prefer a level based SW 2 just like the first one, which ironically, has a lot of replay value for me.

Talking of replayability, if the game turns out to be bad, it doesn’t matter if it has procedural levels, because noone will play it again.